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Jews and Christians in the Premodern World

In modern times, it is common to think of Judaism and Christianity as two distinct, if historically connected, "religions." Increasingly, however, historians of ancient religions have thought more deeply about the implications of taking Christianity and Judaism in antiquity as more fluid and porous than we tend to think of them. In this upper division course, we will explore the ways in which the boundaries that early Christians attempted to draw between Christianity and Judaism remained unstable and incomplete. While the various efforts to establish early Christian identity led to the production of a variety of hermeneutical representations of the Judaioi, these literary representations nevertheless often reflected, to various degrees, engagement with actual historical Jews/Judeans, who shared political, economic, and intellectual worlds with Christians.
We will consider how early Christian discourse about Jews and Judaism informed and was informed by intra-Christian disputes and their negotiations of their relationships with the wider Greco-Roman culture. We will explore how Christian efforts to establish both continuity and difference between Judaism played a role in the construction of 'orthodoxy' and 'heresy,' as well as the way in which Christians re-appropriated Jewish texts, rituals, and ideas in their efforts to construct a Christian identity. We will also explore how this continued dynamic of difference and continuity continued into the Middle Ages.